Conversational media // headless protocol

The part that jumps out at me in the post blow is this line: “The cost of this permissioning of innovation is you have to give up any sort of global feed. There’s only the local feed assembled from your blygger and RSS inputs.”

You could call the lack of a central feed a sort of “headless architecture,” I think. Sort of like Umbrel. (this could be a stretch)

Conversational media

Which got me thinking about whether or not Blygger should even be thought of as a category of “social” media. The thing is, since your identity is less important than the identity of your content in Blygger, it more seems like conversational media could be the better framing.

It’s designed for replying and iterating. It’s not designed for aligning. 

To borrow from another VGR model of the iterate, it’s a system that doesn’t lend itself to mooks affilitating themselves with one or several favorite knights. 

I doubt this neologism of conversational media will catch on, but once it occurred to me I had to write it down. 

by Venkatesh Rao · quoted from v3

Client Diversity and Economies of Variety

I think Blygger hits the sweet spot. There’s low consensus need, low security concerns, and an enshrined decision to leave all presentation decisions that do not affect communication semantics to the clients.

But there’s more. I think being backward compatible with RSS and WebMention while introducing novel primitives drives not just client diversity against known patterns (like Farcaster and Bluesky can reproduce many familiar patterns like “Twitter” or “Blog” or “Instagram”), but client innovation. the cost of this permissioning of innovation is you have to give up any sort of global feed. There’s only the local feed assembled from your blygger and RSS inputs. I think this is a necessary condition for approaching biological levels of client diversity. An active innovation frontier is not optional. This of course creates enormous centrifugal divergence pressure, which makes some nice things much harder.

See also:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from play (Seb Paquet)

Also can’t help but notice that Blygger is following the pattern of similar new interaction media. New users’ favorite thing to talk about is the medium. 

Tomorrow I will start doing my Nietzsche challenge on here, though. So I will be putting out at least one item of non-Blygger content every day for a month, if all goes to plan. 

And by “goes to plan” I mean: If I stick to it.

—Brady Dale
September 30, 2026